Face to Face Within the Fire

There are some comments that one hears throughout life that one knows, intuitively, to be profound and important, even without completely understanding them at the time. I heard one such comment the other day while listening to a lecture by R. Yoel Bin Nun, an Israeli Bible scholar. He tells the same story in an article he wrote on the Biblical meaning of the word “Emunah.” I’ll copy the Hebrew below, with a rough translation. In the spoken version he added some background on the poet in question, saying that he came from an assimilated family and only became religious after the Holocaust. He was in the Bergen-Belsen camp.

I thought constantly about the hiding of God’s face (hester panim) in the Holocaust, and I am a second generation Israeli, carrying the name of my grandfather Yoel Fisher HY”D, who was murdered in the purging of the Rohatyn Ghetto in Eastern Galacia, right before Shavuot, on the 4th of Sivan, 5703 (1943).
At a symposium on Jewish Faith and the Holocaust in Jerusalem, I spoke about the hiding of God’s face (hester panim). There I met, for the first time, the poet Holocaust-survivor Itamar Yeoz-Kest who spoke after me and said, “I don’t understand why the Rabbi who spoke before me spoke of hester panim [in the spoken version I heard, he says “I don’t understand why the Rabbi who spoke before me is religious if he thinks that it was hester panim”]. I was there, and the face of God was revealed to us (gilui panim) – face to face within the fire. [Translation here is inexact but I think accurate, and is also based on spoken version.]”
The audience included holocaust survivors and older people. Next to the dais sat Prof. Eliezer Shavid, the first speaker. Yeuz-Keset’s words were received with shocked whispers. I recovered for a moment and said, “Only one who was there can say such a thing. If I were to say something like that, you would all react with fierce anger, and justifiably so.”

I, quite honestly, have no idea what to make of this statement, which is indeed shocking, and as R. Bin Nun says, would be offensive coming from the mouth of anyone but a survivor. But I do think that one who understands it will have understood something very important about human responses to suffering.